Animal Intelligence

A pigeon crapped on my head today. I was running my last lap of the Luxembourg Gardens, when I felt a warm, semi-solid dollop of goo splat on the top of my skull. Even before I smelled it, I knew what it was. You don't mistake something like that for rain. My attempt to wipe it off only smeared the poop around, creating a greenish birdshit mousse that made my hair stink and stand up in very odd ways. But this special event got me thinking about the complex relationships the French have with their animals in particular. And about animal intelligence in general. Let me explain.

If one were do some sort of I.Q. rating of the animals in Paris, dogs would be at the top of the brain chain. Every day you see them out on the street, self-possessed, four-legged boulevardiers. usually ambling yards ahead of their owners, thinking doggie thoughts, off on a doggie mission, lost in doggie world. Unlike their American versions, the dogs of Paris rarely take note of people. They don't pant or pander or snarl or bark or hop up obsequiously or even look at you. Many stroll along leash-less, although an owner and leash are close by. I once saw a dog carrying its own leash in its mouth, sparing its master even that burden. For all I know they may vote in presidential elections.

At the other end of the animal I.Q. spectrum are pigeons. They are far, far, far at the bottom. They are underneath the bottom. To put it another way, their intelligence only slightly higher than gravel.

One of my first impressions of the Luxembourg Gardens was how spectacularly dumb pigeons were. Unlike most creatures with eyes and ears and the ability to walk, not to mention the ability to fly, they were beyond dense. Barely a day went by when I did not almost step on a pigeon during my jog. The scenario was always the same. After I almost tripped over it, the bird would frantically flap its wings and coo and then run around in a tiny circle on the same spot like one of the Three Stooges, giving me multiple chances to step on it or accidentally kick it again. How do they keep from getting run over? I wondered. (Answer: They don't. See photo above.)

First I thought all the birds of Paris were all dimwits on the wing, until my wife and I were waiting for a train at Gare Austerlitz. We were sitting in the inside portion of a cafe. I noticed that a small posse of sparrows were loitering suspiciously outside the automatic door. Whenever a customer walked in, a sparrow would fly in behind him in a kind of I'm-with-him move, then flit around until it found a table with crumbs or, even better, a sympathetic diner. One flew over to the table next to us, perched on the back of a vacant chair facing a woman reading her paper and stared at her with its beady little eyes until she smiled and tossed it some crumbs.

I'M SO HUNGRY I COULD EAT A HORSE . . . REALLY.

Of course critter love does not extend to all animals in France. Go to the markets and you'll see skinned bunnies and the heads of piglets hanging from meat hooks. Go to some neighborhoods and you will find signs for chevalines, horse meat butchers, like this:

Although my understanding is the French are losing their appetite for eating a distant cousin of Seabiscuit, this shop I saw was doing pretty good weekend business. (In case you're wondering, the older the horse, the more tender the meat.)

IN THE COUNTRY

Once you get away from the city there is a big attitude shift. You will not see French people carrying their dogs as though they were made of porcelain or hauling them around in precious carriers with mesh netting windows so Monsieur Le Fido can get a little air and see the sights.

"Country people are more basic, more grounded," is how one veterinarian put it to me.

She has a thriving practice in the Limousin and during one of my visits she showed up late for lunch looking distraught. She accidentally hit a cat. "I can still hear the thump of the body when I ran over it," she moaned.

She figured out which farmhouse it belonged to, went to the front door and nervously knocked. "Do you have a red and white cat?" she asked the woman who answered.

"I have two," the woman said.

"Not any more," said the vet. Then she told the cat owner about the accident.

The woman shrugged. "Better the cat than me."

"This is what I like about country folks," the veterinarian said. "They see animals as animals. Not as people or substitute children."

Later she was complaining about a young horse she had recently bought and how aggressive and untrainable he was. When I suggested she sell it, she replied, "I couldn't do that. He's too dangerous. I would worry he would hurt the new owner."

What about loaning it out for breeding?

"He's not that much of a thoroughbred. I'll try one more round of training."

"And if that doesn't work?"

"I'll eat him," she said.

Bon appetit.

Fascinating French Fact: The oldest public pet cemetery in the world is Le Cimetière des Chiens on the outskirts of Paris.

Getting out and around

You get punished for being a homebody in Paris. In the past few months I missed seeing the runaway horse, the naked pole vaulter and most recently (sigh) the naked models walking down the street where I get my hair cut, all of whom were galavanting just blocks away from our apartment. Oh well. Ever since I opted to blow off Woodstock and stay home and drink beer with friends, I felt like my destiny is always to miss the real party.

Fortunately I've discovered if you do manage to get out and around and keep your eyes open, there are still little surprises to be found. Some examples:

The other day I was passing a neighborhood wine shop which had their weekly specials in the window. Among them was a bottle of Cotes-Du-Rhone which caught my eye. The reason was the label.[See above left. Take a close look.] It had bumps all over it, like Braille elevator buttons, I thought. I told my wife I saw wine for the blind. I told my friends. I got the look usually given to people who say they have seen a UFO.

But I was right. The label was in Braille. I learned that since 1996 the wine maker, Michel Chapoutier, has been labeling all his wines with Braille, partly as an homage to the previous owner of the property who created a shorthand version of Braille, and partly to make his wine more accessible to wine lovers with impaired vision.

(Sometimes forgotten among in the thickets of history is how much various French innovators have done to improve the lives of the handicapped. A blind autodidact and gifted musician and inventor, Louis Braille gave the world the raised dot reading system used today on books, elevator buttons and wine labels. Another Frenchman, Abbe Charles Michel de L'Epee was the first person to establish a school exclusively for deaf children. It was replicated in the United States with the help of one of his teachers.)

* * *

On a more mundane note, I am constantly fascinated during my Parisian walkabouts by the extremes to which people go to keep their bikes from being stolen. This person removed his seat and U-locked the bike to a tree guard. It must take him an hour to get ready for a ride:

And I cannot get over the fact that sometimes you can turn an ordinary street corner and see hundreds of rollerbladers coming at you:

That's almost as good as a runaway horse.

Fascinating French Fact: Abbe Charles Michel De L'Epee is interred in the historic 17th century church of Saint-Roch on the Right Bank, where there is a statue of him and, below it, a thank you plaque from the blind people of Belgium.

Just Buzz Me In

The morning we walked into the courtyard of our apartment building for the first time a compact little woman came walking towards me. She was shaped like R2D2 and was carrying a 50-pound suitcase from the curb – mine – in one hand and shaking my hand with the other. This was Madame Rosa, our concierge.

The last concierge I dealt with was a smarmy, oleaginous fellow working the front desk of a hotel in Los Angeles who helped me find a good Thai restaurant. Madame Rosa was part of a different tradition. Her job dates to the 19th century. Back then Napoleon started the whole thing by requiring that every apartment building in Paris have a caretaker, a concierge. (No one seems to knows where the word came from, but one school of thought says it was a corruption of le compte de cierge, literally the “keeper of the candle” and originally referred to a person in the Middle Ages whose job was to light the castle candles - cierges - at the end of day and take care of other housekeeping matters. Or maybe not.)

SNITCH IN RESIDENCE
Whatever the word's provenance, Napoleon wasn’t thinking of candles or the comfort of Parisians when he laid down his mandate. He wanted to keep his eye on his fellow Frenchmen. The guy was a world class paranoid.

Concierges in those days knew a lot - part of their job was to open the doors for their tenants and their guests - and were paid little. Consequently they also made ideal informers for government agents and anyone else willing to buy from them what they knew. Fairly or not, the concierges became typecast as a kind of latter-day Madame DeFarge, cold-hearted gossips and greedy harridans willing to turn in their tenants for the right price.

By the turn of the 21st century many of these gardiennes had been replaced by the security keypad with numbered buttons [see photo] you will see in the doorway of most Parisian apartment buildings. The concierge was becoming part of a quaint, fading tradition like the hurdy-gurdy man outside the Luxembourg Gardens or the guy in the Tuilleries who rents sailboats to children. In many buildings the little one or two-room concierge apartments by the front door were renovated and sold for a tidy pile of Euros, and their occupants were encouraged to return to Portugal where many, including Madame Rosa, are from.

NEW CACHET

The number of concierges in Paris have shrunk drastically. In the 1950s there were around 70,000 in Paris. By some estimates today there are around 20,000. Now that they are so rare, there is a newly discovered chicness to having a concierge in one's building. I found this out one day when Peter, an American I met in Paris, was stunned to hear me say that we had one. Or as he put it: “You have a concierge?” He was impressed.

I was impressed that he was impressed. He had lived in Paris off and on since the 70s and was continually bemused by the simple minded discoveries I was sharing with him. (“Peter, have you seen this huge pointy thing on the south bank of the Seine? Made by a guy named Eiffel?”)

Because of his approving reaction I looked at Madame Rosa in a new light. But she seemed oblivious to her status. She had the forlorn expression of someone constantly beset with worry about: the cleanliness of our courtyard, the efficiency – or lack of it – of mail delivery which the tenants complained about, the parade of workmen renovating the apartment upstairs in, the mess they made in her hallways, the theft of champagne from one of the caves in the basement during the renovation, the carelessness with which people sorted the trash. Notices were going up almost weekly to alert us to be on the lookout for thieves, to tell us that she was not withholding mail and delivering it when she felt like it, to tell us we should crush our cardboard cartons before dumping them in the trash, to tell us it wasn't her fault the workmen were making a mess.

Still, she had power and we were instructed to woo her. “She has a lot of time on her hands during the day for ironing," our landlord suggested. "You could give her some of your shirts.”

Crap, I thought. All the shirts I brought with me were made of some astonishing no-wrinkle superfabric. If you tied them in knots and drove a steam roller over them and staked them out in the dessert soaking wet, they would never, ever, ever show so much as a pucker. But I had to do something, so one day I grabbed a couple of wet shirts right out of the wash, smushed and twisted and knotted them and immediately ran to Madame Rosa's apartment to hand them off to her before they unwrinkled on me.

An hour later I heard was a buzz at the door. There she stood proudly holding out my shirts as though they were vestments. I don't know how she did it but somehow she had managed to iron new wrinkles into them. (A year later they are still there.) But they were folded neatly.

I gushed, “So quick. Thank you. Thank you very, very much. How much do I owe you?”

“Pffffff,” she waved the matter off as though it were just a favor, neighbor to a neighbor. But it was like more a favor done by the Godfather. The burden of just and appropriate recompense was on me. And whatever it was I knew it had better be good.

Paranoid French fact: Napoleon had Baron (who was not a Baron) Haussmann widen some of the narrow streets into leafy boulevards not for their gentle ambiance, but to make it difficult for a revolting citizenry to blockade them and to serve as routes to dispatch masses of crowd controlling troops in case of an uprising.

Meet Mr. Alphabet

“Ooooh,” Mlle. Butterfly groaned and dropped her head onto the desk. “I'm exhausted.”

In the months we had been desk buddies this was the most demonstrative she had ever been. Usually class began with a nod, a perfunctory “Ça va?” and we’d open our notebooks in silence. She did not encourage questions. I did not ask any. Our relationship was like that of two polite strangers sitting next to each other in coach on a long, long flight, each doing their best not to invade the other’s armrest space and minimize personal interaction. For her to even share the small fact she was fatiguée was unprecedented.

“Why?” I asked.

“I spent all day Sunday at EuroDisney.”

“My god,” I gasped. “WHY?” I completely forgot that place existed.

“Visitors. With children,” she muttered into her folded arms.

It turned out that even exhausted, she loved every minute. She was a fan and often went to the Disney World in her hometown, Tokyo.

“Have you been?” she asked.

“To the one in the United States,” I said. “I saw Tokyo Disney on the way to the airport.”

“You’ve been to Japan?” She looked up.

“For a few weeks. On business. I know five Japanese words: Hai [yes], Arigato [thank you], Domo Arigato [thank you very much], Ohayo [Good morning] and Konichiwa [Good afternoon]. No, seven: sushi and saki. No nine: Toyota and Honda.”

No smile. “Did you go to Kyoto?”

I could not figure out a way to say in French, “I did want to go, but It was a working trip and I was scheduled from nine in the morning to late at night every day so I didn’t have any free time except for one Sunday, and by then I was so fatigué all I wanted to do was sleep in, even though Kyoto was only a three hour train ride away so I did, but I feel guilty about missing it.”

So I said, “No.”

“You should have gone.” She frowned.

“Yeah, well I should have done a lot of things.”

THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING CLASS

“Coucou! Coucou!” Mlle. G. our teacher was calling out, trying to get everyone to quiet down. Our band of French grammar explorers was shrinking by the week.

The very sad Japanese woman I noticed the first class abruptly disappeared after just a couple of sessions. A few weeks later it was the young woman from Cuba. I missed her droll sense of humor. (When I told her I knew some people who had gone kayaking in Cuba and asked if she ever tried it, she shook her head. “My family is descended from slaves. We don’t get into boats.”)

Then the Hungarian costume designer who had an amazing wardrobe of silk scarves disappeared. Perhaps he ran out of class scarves. And then there was Maria, the animated Italian with the beautiful smile and delightfully accented French. She followed her husband back to Rome.

But Mlle. Butterfly remained, doggedly coming to every class. She had been a bit of a mystery, not so much aloof as wistful. Gradually I learned that she had come to Paris ten years ago, stayed to marry a Frenchman, stayed on after the divorce. She was in her 40s. She used to work for an insurance company. But now she worked in a shop on the Champ d'Elysees as a vendeuse, a saleswoman, handling expensive handbags. She told me the name of the boutique and was horrified I did not recognize the brand.

“I'm not a handbag shopper,” I apologized.

“But the bags are famous,” she said.

“No doubt,” I said in broken French, “but the World of the Handbag is not the World of Doug.”

In spite of my ignorance of bags, we had become a team. She was able to explain things to me in baby French. In return, I had a talent I had underestimated. I knew the alphabet.

MR. ALPHABET TO THE RESCUE

Early on, I noticed that she took notes in Japanese script. She had an electronic French-Japanese dictionary which showed on its screen French words in Japanese script. One week after I missed a class and asked to copy down the homework assignment. She showed me her notebook, pages of Japanese writing. That was when I realized why those impromptu essays we had to write were so difficult for her. She hadn’t mastered the Western alphabet. She struggled to craft one sentence, while I would crank out paragraphs of bad French on the most absurd topics.

One typical assignment: What does a baby dream? I was thinking of an old Jack Handey Deep Thought: “A boy wants to grow up to be a fireman, but a man wants to grow up to be a giant, monster fireman.”

So I wrote: “I will be a fireman or perhaps a soldier, but not the president because I hate politics. I will live in the country and would like to have two or three chickens, and some cows. I will stay in a little house in the Perigord.” This, from a grown man. (Don’t laugh. I got a “Tres bien.”)

Whenever someone from the two-student teams had to go the blackboard for an exercise, Mlle. Butterfly commanded, “You go. That’s not my métier.” So I would stand there meekly as she called out grammatical corrections for me to make or sometimes send me back to the board to fix an error. It's fair to say that if I made a list of 10,000 possible scenarios of my life in Paris, standing at a blackboard being ordered around at by an ex-pat Japanese vendeuse would not be on the list.

That night as we were leaving class, I overheard someone say to Mlle. Butterfly, "Are you not feeling well?"

"I'm just tired. I was at Euro Disney all day yesterday."

"My god," I heard. "WHY?"

The Fish of April

When we arrived in the classroom where we had our French lessons I always felt the presence of the children who were there before us. Apparently part of their school day was for music. There was a small drum set pushed into a corner and in the back of the room some music books. Some time between their departure and our arrival I suspect the teacher tried to erase all traces of the children - no papers, no doodles. The board was wiped clean. Even so, there would be little clues what their day was like.

On the evening of April 1 I noticed a small pile of paper fish cutouts the kids had made. They were on a table in the corner. Some were marked "Poisson d'Avril." I discovered that in France it is a tradition to pin or tape a small paper fish, like a "Kick Me" sign, on the back of someone else as an April Fool's joke. In general if you've pranked someone and they fall for it on April 1 you can yell "Poisson d'Avril!" literally Fish of April. As they say here: bizarre. What is this all about, I wondered.


"HAPPY NEW YE . . " HANG ON
My research turned up a lot of confusing explanations as to how this all came to be. The most common one was something I found on a French website which lays the whole thing at the feet of King Charles IX. The story goes that the calendar year used to begin on April 1 but in 1564 Charles switched it to January 1. In those days it was a tradition to exchange gifts at the beginning of the year. When the calendar changed, some jokers thought it would be funny to also exchange gifts in April as well. Wacky gifts.

YEAH, BUT WE'RE STICKING PAPER FLOUNDERS ON PEOPLE'S BACKS BECAUSE . . .
Why a fish? It depends on whom you ask. One site said that April comes at the end of Lent when traditionally no one ate meat, only fish. Because of that, people used to give fishes to each other. (Hey, don't judge. They didn't have cable in those days.) Another source claimed it was because the moon in early April was in the zodiac position of Pisces. Yet another explained that the icthyological gesture was inspired by the fact that in early April it is forbidden to fish because they are breeding and are too vulnerable and dumb (when were fish smart?) and easy to catch.

Yet another - and in my opinion, the most lame ass - explanation offered by a British author who said the fish was because the baffled face of the victim of a joke has the bug-eyed look of a hooked carp.

THEREFORE . . .
But it all seems to circle back to Charles IX. Many citations say it sprung from his decision to adopt the Gregorian Calendar, which puts the beginning of the year at January. Except there is a little problem with that. The Gregorian Calendar was formally launched in 1582, not 1565 and by then Charles IX was dead. (He died in 1574, eight years before the Vatican rollout.) The only thing that might save this explanation, say Charles theorists, is that the idea of a January-first calendar had been around since the Council of Trent in 1545.Maybe the king decided to adopt it early, to show up the rest of Europe. It would not have been the first time the French launched a global trend.

Why is there blood all over my homework?

Two nights a week we would trudge over to rue l‘Arbre Sec, which I came to think of Hangman’s Alley, for class. Every session would begin the same way. Mlle. G., our dynamic teacher, would start on the dot of 6:30 and immediately plunge into the grammatical thickets of the Futur Simple, the Futur Proche and the Passé Composé.

That’s what I think was going on. For the first 20 minutes or so, until my French ears kicked in, what I heard was: “Murmur Murmur Murmur Murmur. Voila. Murmur Murmur Murmur Murmur. Voila. Murmur Murmur Murmur Murmur Murmur Murmur. Ce n’est pas grave (which sounded like one word – Cepasgrave ) . . .” I could deduce what she was talking about mostly by what she wrote on the blackboard.

Around the 40-minute mark a hazy comprehension began to seep through. I was thinking about what a friend who had lived in Paris for years once told me, “If you didn’t grow up speaking French, it’s like listening through cheesecloth.”

PARIAH
I had cheesecloth issues. The biggest was the Pariah Effect. Each desk accommodated two students. Every class I sat in the same spot – second row, front, left of center. Every class one of my fellow Francophiles would sit next to me - once. In one it was the girl from Cuba. In the following class it was the costume designer from Hungary. After that it was the young Australian woman working in TV, followed by the self-possessed Spanish architectural student who was replaced the following week by the intense tri-lingual young Chinese businesswoman, to be eclipsed by the male nurse from Sri Lanka.

It didn’t take long for me to see the pattern. After one session of sitting with me and trying to comprehend my frightening French, they picked a seat as far away as possible in the next class. After a few weeks the back of the room was packed, and the front, especially near where I was, looked like a tiny neutron bomb had gone off.

MLLE BUTTERFLY

Somewhere around the eighth session I got a permanent deskmate. She was a Japanese woman in her 40s. I thought of her as Mlle. Butterfly because she was not married and always seemed lost in a sad memory. I realize now what I thought of as tristesse was merely bafflement at my odd pronunciation. Why she stayed, I don’t know. Weariness is my guess. She came to the evening class after work and I supposed that after a long day on the job she was simply too tired to walk to the back of the room and join the others, even after she realized her mistake.

I thought of her and the very depressed seeming Japanese woman of the first class after I read about something called the Paris Syndrome. This afflicts Japanese tourists and ex-pats, especially women. According to a Japanese psychiatrist who lives in Paris, the syndrome is a paralyzing state of ennui that overwhelms his fellow countrymen and women who come to Paris expecting a cinematically romantic experience and instead are traumatized by the brusqueness and emotional outbursts of Parisians. It can get so bad that some have had to be flown back to Japan accompanied by a nurse . He estimated some 12 Japanese a year succumb. How it justifies a full-blown syndrome is beyond me, but Japan is not a large country so maybe 12 people is a big deal.

At any rate there were days when I wondered if Mlle. Butterfly was a victim, or at least a carrier. But after a while I decided she was more likely afflicted with something more mundane: Job Fatigue.

THE BLOODIED PAPER

One of our assignments was to interview our deskmates and write up a short report on what they told us about themselves. We were not allowed to use our dictionaries, which I thought was not fair given my French vocabulary is about 12 words, but I gave it a shot.

The following week I got the paper back. Mlle. Butterfly glanced over and her eyes literally bugged out with horror. The paper was covered in blood-red inky corrections [see above]. Even so, I got a feeble "Bien!" for my effort. I was impressed by the thoroughness and professional brutality of the teacher’s work, and depressed that I didn’t even know enough French, say, to write a ransom note to a moron. [“I have dog. You give money or dog die.”] Mlle. Butterfly offered some sympathy, I think. Or maybe she suggested I join a Special Ed class. I couldn't really understand. The cheesecloth effect.